PERFECT SINS

A second case—call it a case and a fraction—for Constable Hazel Best and Gabriel Ash, the much-tried man she befriended in Deadly Virtues (2013).

Gabriel’s career with national security investigating Somali pirates came to an abrupt end, along with his peace of mind, when his wife and their sons vanished, presumably captured or killed on the orders of the people he was investigating. Now his only goal in life is to find them, if they’re still alive. But his inquiries among weapons manufacturers like Stephen Graves move slowly, so he’s available along with Hazel to help out when Lord Peregrine "Pete" Byrfield, who employs Hazel’s father as a handyman, begins an investigation of some possible burial mounds on his estate. After he’s surveyed potential locations for Pete, archaeologist David Sperrin digs into one especially promising site and does indeed find human bones. But they’re a young boy’s, and they’re only 30 years old. Somehow Fred Best persuades his daughter that the remains may be those of David’s brother Jamie, who was reportedly carried off by his father to Ireland many years ago, at the same time that Pete is persuading himself that his own parents may have borne a son before him and then killed him—an awkward contrivance that pays off in a breathless series of complications and teasing alternatives involving Pete’s and David’s thoroughly unlikable mothers. The mystery of the buried child is solved early on, leaving veteran Bannister 50 pages to return to the question of who came close to killing Gabriel and Hazel and why.

The briefer framing case is touching but otherwise unsatisfying. But the main course of old bones is a humdinger.